I love Lee Lozano

Grass Piece

Biography l

Throwing Up Piece





Real Money Piece

Clarification Piece, July 28, 1969


Frontispiece l. 3

http://leelozano.net/
Arts Journal Review

I was going to write about Lee Lozano last week, but I had some difficulty finding the works that I wanted to talk about. I discovered her work when I ventured up the New York for the first time EVER, this January. We took the metro to Queens to check out PS.1. Her work was part of the 1969 collective up, and I fell in love with it immediately.

Ms. Lozano was born Lee Knastner in Newark in 1930. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. A brief marriage in the late 1950's to an architect, Adrian Lozano, ended in divorce. Her history is interesting, while her time and notoriety she received in the art world was brief, the prices of her works skyrocketed after her death on October 2, 1999 from cervical cancer. Murmurs of exploitation and scandal are associated with her posthumous recognition. Lee also decided to drop out of the art world, and I find this conscious decision of hers admirable in some way.

"Ms. Lozano was a quixotic, confounding rebel whose decadelong New York career seemed always to involve pushing one limit or another." Evidently Lee was also known for her drug taking behavior and some had said she began losing her mind. She was known for a piece where she decided to boycott women for a month or two as a means of improving communication with them. And for some reason Lee continued this piece up until her death. Also, when I saw her work at PS.1, I was completely unaware that she was female. Well, it turns out that her frequent name changes, were, in fact, another project of hers, with the intention to obscure her gender and live in a male only society.

It sounds like Ms. Lozano and I would have much to talk about.

Lee was known as a painter and a conceptual artist. Her first paintings were done in an expressionistic style and were often sexual. Her style shifted and then became more minimalist and she produced monochromatic 'wave' paintings that pushed the limits of visual perception. Then in the 1960's she began to "execute a series of life-related actions (she didn't like the word performance) that tested, among other things, her stamina, her friends' patience and the conduct of everyday life. These works reflected her friendship with Conceptually inclined artists like Sol LeWitt, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham and Carl Andre. They also reflected an increasing disenchantment with the art world that bordered on hostility." I feel like I am similarly dealing with disenchantment and hostility directed at the art world. She was attracted to these works because they were unsaleable and democratic. I find this element of her work very attractive.

But what I saw at PS.1 was not her paintings, nor her performances. It was her proposals or recordings of the piece, that was written by her hand, which she considered drawings. These are known as her notebooks. I love the ideas that Lee articulates through language, and I have realized that a huge aspect of my work is conceptual, and is driven and rooted in ideas that are articulated and known through language. I have realized nothing turns me on more than ideas, than breaking down and stretching the barriers of the mind (which explains my interest in mind altering substances/drugs) and I love Lee for her ideas, much more than her paintings.

'Clarification Piece' is definitely my favorite work. However, these are just transcribed copies, a majority of the original ones I saw at PS.1 are hand written, and this makes a lot of difference to me. But, I only managed to find these after downloading some obscure PDF and taking screenshots of it for this blog.

"All of the works transcribe below first appeared in Lozano’s set of small private notebooks which she latter organized and transcribed into a quarto sized set of lab books. For exhibitions, such as the Virginia Dwan Language III show, 1969, she would then re-transcribe the particular work to be shown and exhibit it framed and hanging from the wall. In addition, she also distributed the pieces freely through the mail to her friends in the form of carbon and Xerox copies. My transcriptions below come from her lab books and span an eleven month period in 1969, with the Dialogue Piece spanning almost the entire time. A careful reading will reveal the intertwining of the works as various participants found themselves in one project, and then in another. I have tried to maintain all idiosyncrasies in her spelling and punctuation; when clarification was needed, I added my notes in square brackets. Beyond those people mentioned above, special thanks is due to Mr. Brad Campbell who actually transcribed most of the works below and continues to assist me in all of the Antinomian Press publications. However, all errors in the final draft are mine as I was responsible for the proof reading and final format.
Ben Kinmont
NYC, February 1998"

Antinomian Press
14 February 1998
New York City
150 Copies
Downloaded from
antinomianpress.org

Trine Sun Mars

my name is vidalia

my name is vidalia rosemary clementine,
his is russet dill roma.
we
can't
wear
holsters
any
more.
just like how no one reads westerns.

I think it's funny, how back in my day, we use to say,
soon they're gonna make salt illegal

mae brought me some 22 short copper hollow points today. I'm buying her drinks to settle.

A few more notes:
-Thinking is writing, writing is thinking.
-You do not really know a thing, until you have the word for it.
-Understand that knowing, believing, thinking, and feeling are all different.
-Truth is linguistic.

On Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's "Inanimate Alice"

Screenshots of Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China (You can click for larger views)

http://www.inanimatealice.com/

As quoted from the website:
"'Inanimate Alice' tells the story of Alice, a young girl growing up in the first half of the 21st century, and her imaginary digital friend, Brad.

Over ten episodes, each a self contained story, we see Alice grow from an eight year old living with her parents in a remote region of Northern China to a talented mid-twenties animator and designer with the biggest games company in the world."

Currently only the first 4 Episodes are up, and in Episode 4 Alice has reached 14 years old. I strongly encourage you to watch/play them, and START AT THE BEGINNING!

These interactive narrative is written and directed by writer Kate Pullinger and digital artist Chris Joseph.

The prompt for this week:
"Inanimatealice" has a number of distinctively digital features -- hyperlinks, required user interactions, fading and shifting graphic images, etc. The core of the narrative, however, can be told in text-only terms; it could even be printed as a page in a book. What exactly does the story gain from being presented in the new media format. What does a reader get from the story as told on screen that makes it better than the same story told as a text?


I agree with Hayles when she claims that “To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all” (3). We may approach a work with expectations that are grounded in our traditional experience of printed literature, and out “of necessity, electronic literature must build on these expectations even as it modifies and transforms them” (4). The same considerations must be taken in regards to our experience with its interface. The computer is express, if not instantaneous. A certain anxiety level is reached if the player sits on the same page for so long without clicking/continuing, which has been ingrained through our use of this machine. You just don’t have the patience for it. I really was wondering if I was missing something, if I could find something equivalent to a secret song hidden after minutes of silence on a CD, but I could never idle for very long, no instead I was being pulled along. This is harnessed even further in Episode 3 where the player is required to collect dolls in order to continue the story for a new level of interactivity and responsibility directed at the viewer/player. This is one aspect that I think enables the use of the simplistic text to tell the narrative. Had this been reproduced in print to tell the same story it would undoubtedly prove a failure.

Another aspect is the “enhanced sensory range” that players/viewers of the story experience as they are exposed to moving images, seemingly real-based imagery, interactive gaming experiences, and sound (a very powerful element). Hayles addresses this hybrid nature as a “trading zone” where “different vocabularies, expertises, and expectations come together to see what might emerge from their intercourse” (4). The code, or language that lay behind the façade of the screen enhances the experience of the simple narrative that we read. Simultaneously, I think that this is teaching us to block out many levels of awareness of the outside world in order to teach us to be able to comprehend the many levels of experience within this virtual one.

Maybe this is why Alice seems so simple and static to us. Through the story you soon realize that her human interactions are limited mostly to her parents, and as a result she seems to have invented a digital friend, Brad. Like our computers, her player seems to be a projection, or extension, of the self. And this is what you see develop instead of the narrative. And while we all might interact more with each other, and are connected to more people on a virtual level, is it not fair to say that our social ‘real’ interactions have drastically changed as a result? I myself began wondering if Alice was somewhat socially inept at communicating her story to us through the narrative, which I imagine to be her spoken words directed at us.

*N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary

On Leishman's "Red Riding Hood" and Waber's "Strings"

Screenshots of Leishman's Red Riding Hood.

Well, here's something I found appropriate for my blogosphere. Stimulated by my Honors New Media Literature class being taught at VCU by professor Nick Sharp, I formed responses to some new exciting works that are bridging art and literature through an electronic interface.

The first one being Donna Leishman's "Red Riding Hood" (one of my favorite childhood fairy tales), and Dan Waber's "Strings", both of which are accessed through the Electronic Literature Organization @ www.eliterature.org

The prompt to which I responded was:

Does Leishman's putting the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood into interactive code actually do anything to the story that couldn't have been done with a comic book? Does Waber's "Strings" do anything that couldn't have been just aw well accomplished with a set of still images?


I believe that if Leishman's Red Riding Hood was done via comic book, a completely different point would have been communicated to the user. I think that by choosing to do an interactive format the work addresses questions or provokes thoughts in the user that never would have been brought up if it were a comic book format. As Beiguelman put it, "The interface is the message" (29). I think that people may be uncomfortable with this because it is a new medium that has few conventions (meaning you don't really know how to operate it, this can be so scary), whereas books have a long history, and their form and function are known and accepted by everyone, and rarely questioned. We certainly have had revolutions within all other art forms: painting, sculpture, photography, but it seems that the content (ideas/words) within the bound book evolves, but not many challenge the actual 'interface' itself. Leishman's work transcends the narrative story. People might argue that it's interactiveness is a sham because it's pre-programmed and you don't have much decision making power, but to me the work is a lot like a dream. You might want more control, but you don’t. I think the surreal, weird, and disturbing nature of the work corresponds and is amplified by the level of interactiveness. I enjoyed figuring out what was clickable, and the level of interactiveness of the things on the screen. Both works were successful to me in their ability to "[turn] an object into an event" (17).

Strings also goes beyond what simple text on a page would communicate. The media allowed you to interpret these words with your other senses. I would correlate the intensity of the movement of the words with how they might be spoken, or even to internal nonphysical feelings. Flirt made me laugh because I couldn’t figure out what it was trying to ‘say’ to me, which is often the case when we interact with humans. These titles though were also very important in directing how you were supposed to interpret the active words. These titles functioned like simple text, but the strings themselves, did not.

*The text being referenced is Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, "new media poetics: contexts, technotexts, and theories"

That being said, I strongly encourage all those out there to check out both works.

I truely believe we are turning into cyborgs...I will continue to explore this further in this blog.

And then there was Light (the beginning)

Well, the basis of creating this blog is because I like sharing information. When this happens, new ideas are born, and I find this very exciting. Also, I have some deep yearning to feel connected with the whole, and the internet is the prime tool for harnessing this desire.

Still I'm not going to lie, I still feel a little silly starting this.

And essentially this will be a compilation of my various interests. Including, but not limited to: music, art, food, meaning, language, reality, truth, perception, astrology, tarot, crystals, herbs, 2012...does the title, "Cornbread and Pluto" make a little more sense now?